14ymedio, Havana, 27 January 2024 — Young people, armed with knives and machetes, and organized into violent gangs. These are the members of the multiple “groups” that, according to a lieutenant colonel of the Ministry of the Interior during a recent public appearance, “implement terror” in Santiago de Cuba.
A video of the meeting, released by independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta, shows dozens of neighbors of the Abel Santamaría neighborhood in Santiago listening to the officer’s speech, surrounded by other police agents. The purpose was to report on the arrest of five young members of a gang who, wielding knives, assaulted a cafeteria in the early morning of January 7.
The lieutenant colonel stressed that it was an “organized group,” and that the assault ended with an employee – from whom they took clothes and money – receiving minor injuries, and a customer whose “right hand was amputated” while trying to escape from the assailants with another person. The mutilated person – whom the officer does not identify – is, according to Mayeta, a lineman from the Santiago Empresa Eléctrica, David Enrique Perdomo Álvarez. According to the recording, “he is still recovering.”
For the soldier, this “unfit behavior” of the five gang members is shared with many other criminals from Santiago de Cuba
For the soldier, this “unfit behavior” of the five gang members is shared, he insisted, with many other criminals from Santiago de Cuba. “We know who they are and we are going to get them,” he promised, speaking on behalf of “all the organs” of the Ministry of the Interior that accompanied him. He added that, after the interrogation of the five detainees, they gathered more information about “the different groups that operate in these places” and “beyond, in the city of Santiago.”
The lieutenant colonel spared no